like every year. It is always such a big deal with the features they implement the scream it out loud as much as they can but most of the time they are either incomplete or not really ready for production environments. (read:Containers)

ALi

608 posts

09 Mar 2011

I've been following the news about project XBR and I attended the latest Autodesk webinar on it. And believe me or not, Max 2012 is more than just a new yearly version and it's just a step closer to final project. The project started earlier by max 2010 and improved a lot in 2011 and there're many improvements in 2012 too.

Users will always complain about something, and there is no perfect software, but max 2011 was littered with half baked features.The interface felt like it was made by MacGyver using a Swiss army knife and duct tape.I know this whole XBR thing couldn't be done in a single step,but they could have skipped 2011 and release a finished product a year later.We don't need yearly releases, it's not like they have any real competition. And who can afford to pay the upgrade price every year.And I should definitely sue Autodesk for my coffee addiction.... after working with max 2011, going back and opening max 2008 felt like the Enterprise at warp 9.9.Sorry for my rant, Max 2012 may turn out to be a good and polished product, defying hour decade long bad experiences.

yeah what i am missing all this years is basically instead of adding new features they say ok this version we are going to kill all known bugs for 10 versions and make everything more stable and just fix a version. We are working in this company with maya and max. And maya doesn't crash that often as max. Sometimes you do an undo and BAM CTD.

sanyilajos Wrote:Users will always complain about something, and there is no perfect software, but max 2011 was littered with half baked features.The interface felt like it was made by MacGyver using a Swiss army knife and duct tape.I know this whole XBR thing couldn't be done in a single step,but they could have skipped 2011 and release a finished product a year later....after working with max 2011, going back and opening max 2008 felt like the Enterprise at warp 9.9...

The funny thing is that i never heard maya users complain so much about maya. Max is awesome to use it is much easier than maya in some points(and thats what maya guys say) but it isn't really stable and fast as a piece of software.The interface is horrible. Because they never had really a real interface designer. until now. Everything is just slapped together. Every feature that is "bought" or written gets a own interface from the programmer that is writing it.

What i realized further is that max is adding features the last couple of years by buying 3rd party plugins and slapping them into max. Thus a lot of them are not really really implemented and most of them are scripted therefore very slow.

ALi

608 posts

10 Mar 2011

Yeah I know what you mean. But Autodesk has changed their way, though I agree with sanyilajos about upgrading cost. But I guess it worth the time. After all I think the 2011 version is more stable than previews releases and Autodesk plans seem promising to me. I wish we all get what really will be satisfied with.

XBR webinars do rise hopes and expectations. As for max 2012. I saw Nitrous promising though doubtfull that autodesk did anything for deforming meshes performance playback. MassFX - for this I hope autodesk develops it as they plan into unified dynamics system. By the way, somewhere on CGSociety there was post from Ken, main max dev manager, that reactor is taken out from max2012.

Time has passed, lots of talks about new max on CGTalk. Was wondering if anyone here tried it out? What are impressions so far?I got a little bit cautious from talks there, that's normal. But still. Haven't tried myself yet. At work I am using max 2011 so far on quite huge arch-viz project, too far to consider risk of moving on to new release.

Grant gives honest review There were info around on CGTalk that with upcoming service pack for max 2012 there will be bug fixes for CAT. Anyone around here seriously played around with CAT?

ALi

608 posts

05 May 2011

Yeah I really liked his review.

Didn't heard about CAT. Waiting for my animator friends to try it out. One of friends, if CAT has problems, I'm sure he'll find it once he start working with 2012. He always goes straight to the bugs! He actually tries everything to make the software crash or a bug to occur! lol

Time passed. Now we have SP1 and 2 Hotfixes for max. Seems CAT gets attention finally, becomes more stable. I started to use it on my own. Has its quirks of course but CAT seems like cool animation system on its own.

Stumbled upon this reel of CAT user Gregor Weiss. Might be of interest to those looking into CAT and what others do with it. Some nasty creatures walking there

i know that it sucks for transfering mocap data to (which isnt the point but if the client gives you a CAT rig and wants mocap data on it you have to pretty much improvise the data transfer. (nope the tutorial from louis marcoux isnt correct)